The Globe & Mail’s Mathew Ingram describes an almost surreal story about Business Week asking people not to link to it, in 2008!
I canceled my subscription to Business Week earlier this year. It was the last subscription I had. Business Week spills a lot of ink on innovation and the Web economy… so it’s surprising to see them this archaic on understanding how the Web works and recognizing that asking people not to link to you is impossible, let alone impractical.
Anyway, it got me to think, in light of McGraw Hill’s so-so recent results (Ad revenue at BusinessWeek.com grew 10.5 percent in the quarter and 14.8 percent for the full-year 2007), was this backwardness affecting BusinessWeek.com’s traffic and revenue?
BusinessWeek.com is a good site, but I wondered, how does it do compare to a peer that seems more progressive, say Forbes.com?
Here is one graph comparing Forbes with BusinessWeek, as you can see, both sites have been pretty flat (yes I know Alexa sucks etc.)
Clearly that does not help us conclude anything… though I’d argue that Forbes gets a bit irritating when every time you land on a page you are redirected to an intermercial ad (the Quote of the Day does not make it less irritating).
Actually, the quote is a nice touch.
Anyway, so I wondered: what about taking linking to the extreme. If BusinessWeek.com does not want your stinking links, the site at the other extreme that really wants your links would be, well, Digg.com.
So what about a social media site such as Digg?
Notice how Digg seemingly took off in traffic just as BusinessWeek.com levels off, and falls?
But this is an incomplete assessment. What about sites who embraced Digg buttons. The NYT did that in late December 2006. What happened to its traffic?
Come to think of it: NYT did not seem to get a boost from Digg. Of course, one argument is that Digg - along with Reddit and other social media aggregators - democratized media by evening the playing ground between big media sites and blogs.
Or, maybe Alexa sucks and this doesn’t mean anything.
Either way, now maybe this is something worth linking to.
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